METAFORA Biosystems, a company that has developed an AI-powered flow cytometry platform to generate better in vitro diagnostics (IVD) and more effective cell therapies, announced in early June the launch of METAflow, a cloud-based software for automated multidimensional clustering of flow cytometry data, which marks a dramatic advance over existing, suboptimal solutions regardless of data processing skills.
Flow cytometry is a method for individual, quantitative and qualitative characterization of cells suspended in a liquid. It consists of a very fast analysis (several thousand events per second) of the optical or physical signals emitted by a cell passing through the light beam of a laser. It is used, for example, for DNA analysis or to diagnose leukemia.
Founded in 2011 and based in Paris, METAFORA, composed of a multidisciplinary team of entrepreneurs, biologists and mathematicians, has developed an innovative platform for the discovery, development and distribution of diagnostic tests that detect cellular energetic anomalies. Using proprietary reagents that quantify cellular nutrient transporters, coupled with powerful algorithms, the flow cytometry platform is able to detect abnormal nutrient consumption that may be at the root of diseases such as neurometabolic diseases, cancer or inflammatory disorders.
This innovation, resulting from research in the CNRS’s cutting-edge academic laboratories, in close collaboration with healthcare providers, has the financial support of the European Commission and Bpifrance.
The METAflow software
METAFORA’s team of cytometrists and mathematicians has developed METAflow, a very robust software and a homogeneous, complete and user-friendly interface, providing objective, reproducible and traceable results, all on a collaborative digital platform.
METAFORA believes that METAflow will enable hundreds of thousands of flow cytometrists to move from cumbersome manual sequential selection to automated multidimensional clustering to obtain more objective data in a much shorter time frame. Users will be able to leverage and extract the best from the growing number of data sets generated by conventional, mass or spectral cytometry.
Vincent Petit, CEO of METAFORA, explains:
“Scientists and biologists today analyze flow cytometry data either manually, through a so-called blocking strategy, or through a mix of manual data preprocessing and deployment of a series of algorithms. A lot of trial and error will occur before the right parameters are found and relevant results are obtained. In contrast, METAflow offers a new way for users to reach their desired populations with just a few clicks. Our beta version has garnered a lot of praise in testing, and we look forward to rolling out METAflow to the broader research community.”
METAflow is currently only used for research purposes, the next step will be to provide a clinical grade version for use in clinical research and routine programs.
Translated from METAFORA biosystems lance METAflow, logiciel cloud d’analyse numérique de cytométrie en flux
